1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for performing intra prediction and, more particularly, to an apparatus and method for performing intra prediction, in which by use of horizontal/vertical blocks adjacent to image data input from an external device, the intra prediction is performed in parallel with respect to 16×16 luminance component and 4×4 luminance component of the image data and then with respect to chrominance component, thereby maximizing efficiency of system to not only reduce execution time and hardware cost but also increase processing speed.
2. Discussion of Prior Art
In general, an intra prediction method according to the prior art has employed the intra prediction technique for left and up directions with respect to DC and AC values when they are selected on an intra basis with respect to 8×8 block unit. In recent years, H.264 has been decided as a standard for high image quality and the intra prediction method is adopted as a standard.
However, The intra prediction apparatus having the above-mentioned configuration for a high image quality image decoder according to the prior art employs the 8×8 block unit intra prediction technique, so that good image quality can not be obtained and the apparatus for VLSI is implemented using an additional memory, which causes a large area and high power consumption.
Furthermore, when an algorithm on the 8×8 block unit is implemented, a lot of computing time, hardware cost, and enormous operations are taken and required, so that it is not suitable for a moving picture coder to be implemented in real-time. In addition, an amount of unnecessary operations is require because a fixed algorithm is used according to image type and application field, therefore a proper intra prediction algorithm can not be used in response to the image type.